The Design And Implementation Of A SOA-Based Precision Agriculture Integration Platform

The content of this paper is originated from "The Research and Application of Digital Knowledge Grid for Agriculture" under the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (863 Program). By proposing an SOA-Based Precision Agriculture Integration Platform, it aims to solve the existing problems in the precision agricultural information applications, in terms of expansion and reuse.Agriculture, as the country's "primary industry", acts as the basis of the national economy. Sustainable development of agriculture and adequate food supply are the prerequisite for a steady national development. Under such circumstances, the only way to address this issue is through implementation of technology, maximizing the utilization of agricultural resources, development of energy efficient production modes and appropriate exploitation and protection of the environment, so as to achieve a sustainable development of the agriculture industry. All these have given to the rise of "precision agriculture". Also known as "fine agriculture", "precision agriculture" is the integrated agriculture with a combined implementation of traditional agriculture and information concept, knowledge as well as technology. It integrates information technology, mechanical engineering technology, biological technology and agricultural technology through a scientific information platform.Precision agriculture is originated in developed countries. There have been extensive researches on the information collection, decision making analysis, precise operation technology with regards to precision agriculture. In the 1990s, scientists in China also proposed the research and application of precision agriculture. In recent years, with the increasing popularity of computers, the rapid growth in information technology industry and its wide application in agriculture, precision agriculture has gained more attention. It is not only regarded as an essential element of China's agricultural development, but is also the frontier of modern agricultural production techniques in a global concept. Meanwhile, China has been substantially carrying out research and application of precision agriculture technology.In the field covered by precision agriculture, software application is the core component of technology system. It is responsible for the functions of information processing, management, analysis and decision-making. It acts as a receiver of the information and data from precision agriculture equipment, as well as a bridge between precision agriculture information collection and precision implementation. However, upon the analysis on current situation both domestically and internationally, it has come to our attention that the existing precision agricultural application systems are facing the following problems:The existing agricultural knowledge information system is not able to meet the growing demand of sharing and exchanging of data due to the rapid development of precision agriculture information technology application. Among the information and data received by different information collecting equipments, there are distinctions in the structure, format and meaning. For conventional information systems, there is only one or more pre-arranged data objects and metadata information targeting at the specific system. There are great difficulties involved in the interaction and utilization of heterogeneous data among different information systems.The existing agricultural knowledge information system is not able to efficiently combine the searching technology and intelligence analysis and forecast system, so as to realize the complementary advantages of the internet information richness and the information system intelligence.Among all the individual agricultural information system, there is no unified portal and personalized custom entrance standards and solutions serving as a reference.In the realization of the integration and sharing of information and services of precision agriculture, there is a lack of a unified platform to achieve a variety of precision agriculture software and lack of services focusing on the use and management. There are design and development of a large number of agricultural knowledge information systems, such as nutrient interpolation, soil type analysis, precision fertilizer, price forecasting, production forecasting and pest control applications, which are intelligent decision making and application systems. These systems use different programming languages, running on different hardware and software platform. Collaboration is difficult due to the isolations. These isolated "islands" caused the redundant construction of agricultural information system. There is also negative impact on knowledge sharing. Ultimately, this will hinder the further development of precision agriculture applications.The study of above problems suggests that service-oriented concepts, procedures as well as technology of realization in modern software engineering have to an extent solved the problems in system integration of precision agriculture. With an analysis of SOA technology and its advantages in system integration, the feasibility and necessity of web services, distributed component technology and Microsoft WCF technology in system integration of precision agriculture were well tested. This led to the solution of system integration of precision agriculture based on SOA technology. The most important feature of this solution is that service-oriented concepts and methodology are applied to the platform and that better integrity and scalability of the platform is ensured through construction of the software. With this, SOA technology allows the platform to be designed with concepts like top to bottom, whole to part, macro to micro, etc. Details such as the design of the overall structure, the network structure and customer service of are also well included in the platform. The main functions on the integrated platform of precision agriculture were realized with full consideration of the requirements and specific design of the system using Microsoft ASP.NET and WCF platform. The expected practicality and scalability was affirmed through the deployment tests.At the end of the paper, a prediction of future development of the integrated platform of precision agriculture was carried out in the perspective of information technology and agriculture.